Can the Teachers Union Give Us Just One Example of Putting Students First?

I have been appearing the last several weeks in a segment called “The Trouble with Schools” on “Fox & Friends,” the Fox New Channel’s morning show. Each week, we’ve been talking about teacher tenure cases, the education establishment looking down its nose at parents and examples of unions stifling education reform.

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The latest example comes from New York City, where school administrators just made a deal with the union to finally evaluate teachers in a relatively meaningful way. To date, evaluations haven’t been worth the paper they’ve were printed on because most teachers are protected by tenure. Sadly, poor teaching had not qualified as a good enough reason to dismiss a teacher.

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As a part of the new deal, teaches with two consecutive years of bad evaluations could be terminated. That’s the good news. But that means 7,000 New York City teachers are off the hook for at least another two years because their slates have been wiped clean. The evaluations begin now, even for teachers who have been known liabilities for years.

How is that fair to current students who will continue to be cheated in classrooms staffed by subpar instructors?

It’s example after example like this that lead me to challenge Weingarten, the president of the nation’s second largest teachers union, to go on Fox & Friends and give America just one example of when her union has put the interest of students first. Does she have the courage to face the harmless hosts of the show to give us one example?